Canned Fruit Cocktail Ice Is The Secret To Preventing Watered Down Drinks
An iced drink often tastes best the moment it's served to you in a cool glass. This is when the flavor is strongest, before the ice begins to melt and it slowly dilutes your drink into something closer to plain water. Instead, you can try using canned fruit cocktails to make ice cubes to "match" the flavors in your drink. It's similar to the old strategy of dropping coffee ice cubes into cold brew, except these will be fruitier and heartier — with the fruit and the syrup together, you've essentially made infused ice cubes that won't water down your drink's consistency or flavor.
To clarify, "canned fruit cocktails" here refers here to a specific mixture of fruits in a can: A can of your classic Del Monte Fruit Cocktail contains a medley of peaches, pears, grapes, pineapples, and cherries mixed in heavy syrup. While some fruits are only canned with juice, many fruit cocktails use simple syrup (made from water and sugar). By pouring the contents of a fruit cocktail can into an ice cube tray and freezing it, you get sweet and sugary fruit-flavored ice cubes to match the flavors of your fruit punch. Or your margarita.
How to make fruit cubes
While an ice cube tray filled with plain water should freeze in about four hours, it's slightly different if you're working with syrup. Any simple syrup will contain sugar, and sugary liquids are more difficult to freeze because sugar lowers a liquid's freezing point. The difference between heavy syrup and light syrup is that heavy syrup contains 40% sugar, and light syrup has 10% sugar. Any syrup can freeze eventually, but heavier syrups could freeze at around 20 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. The resulting ice cubes will likely be sticky when you wrestle them out of the tray. It'll be worth it when they start melting in your drink though, adding extra sweetness and little fruit chunks.
It's okay to just stick to regular frozen fruit as well. It's fairly simple to slice fruit into small chunks and add it into an ice cube tray with some water. It's also easy to make simple syrup yourself by combining equal parts granulated sugar and water, to mix with your own fruits.
Cocktails with extra flavor
Let's say you've successfully frozen your leftover canned fruit — what drinks would go best with the resulting ice cubes? Because a canned fruit cocktail always contains all five of those fruits mentioned at the beginning, you'd ideally want drinks that make use of these fruits. Sangria may be the ideal choice because it includes lots of different fruits mixed in with wine and liquor, and it sometimes contains simple syrup already as a sweetener.
Most cocktails contain a couple of different fruit flavors, but since diced peaches are the most prominent fruit in the canned cocktail, any peach-heavy drinks like a peach julep or a fuzzy navel are options. There are also countless pineapple cocktails out there, from the famous pineapple-and-coconut piña coladas to pineapple mojitos. Some fruity drinks, like fruit martinis or cosmopolitans, don't really need ice since they're chilled before being served.
For non-alcoholic drinks, most punches or lemonades should work great. But be warned, they will get sweeter as the ice cubes melt.